“You’re taller,” someone in the audience yelled out when David Deida first walked out onstage last night at the opening address of this weekend’s Ecstatic Intimacy weekend intensive. Indeed, the spiritual teacher (or “transmitter” as he apparently prefers to call his role) is taller than you might think from his clips on Youtube. 6’2″, perhaps, and dressed in a loose-fitting black suit, Deida–author of the book The Way of the Superior Man and Enlightened Sex among others–used his body and his hands as much as his words to communicate his ideas. The effect was mesmerizing even when his message grew repetitive. But this was more due to the fact that he’s presenting his ideas in a variety of ways in the hopes that one or more will stick. On opening night he touched on the basics; the masculine/feminine polarization, the three stages of development (for both men and women), tantric sex (which led to my favourite line of the evening–something about the necessity of practice, just like music scales, and how if you’re content with “Chopsticks” fine but these practices will let you play Rachmaninoff, sex-wise). After a break, he took questions from the spiritual seekers–about 140 strong, a more or less equal mix of men and women. Most of the questions seemed to be from women in couples seeking to make their relationships stronger and more intimate. In his answers, Deida kept coming back to the masculine/feminine polarization thing, though I must confess I’m more interested in the tantric sex stuff. Does this make me a shallow spiritual seeker? This morning we’ll be doing breathing exercises with his assistants… I must now prepare to be transformed.